Welcome to the OWASP Testing Guide 4.0

“Open and collaborative knowledge: that is the OWASP way.”
With V4 we realized a new guide that will be the standard de-facto guide to perform Web Application Penetration Testing.
-- Matteo Meucci

OWASP thanks the many authors, reviewers, and editors for their hard work in bringing this guide to where it is today. If you have any comments or suggestions on the Testing Guide, please e-mail the Testing Guide mail list:

Version 4.0

The OWASP Testing Guide version 4 improves on version 3 in three ways:

1. This version of the Testing Guide integrates with the two other flagship OWASP documentation products: the Developers Guide and the Code Review Guide. To achieve this we aligned the testing categories and test numbering with those in other OWASP products. The aim of the Testing and Code Review Guides is to evaluate the security controls described by the Developers Guide.

2. All chapters have been improved and test cases expanded to 87 (64 test cases in v3) including the introduction of four new chapters and controls:
- Identity Management Testing
- Error Handling
- Cryptography
- Client Side Testing

3. This version of the Testing Guide encourages the community not to simply accept the test cases outlined in this guide. We encourage security testers to integrate with other software testers and devise test cases specific to the target application. As we find test cases that have wider applicability we encourage the security testing community to share them and contribute them to the Testing Guide. This will continue to build the application security body of knowledge and allow the development of the Testing Guide to be an iterative rather than monolithic process.

Copyright and License

Revision History

The Testing Guide v4 will be released in 2014. The Testing guide originated in 2003 with Dan Cuthbert as one of the original editors. It was handed over to Eoin Keary in 2005 and transformed into a wiki. Matteo Meucci has taken on the Testing guide and is now the lead of the OWASP Testing Guide Project. From 2012 Andrew Muller co-leadership the project with Matteo Meucci.